


the way he loves

by meritmut



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Brooding, F/M, Navel-Gazing, what's another word for brooding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 19:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3499790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is only a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way he loves

He ceases to love her as the rope snaps taut.

She is gone from him, from the world, her soft-eyed love and virtue of character exposed for the shams they were - but then, how true could _his_ love have been, to have believed in both? He’d never truly known his wife, it seems. He’d never seen her truly, as though his vision were fogged, as though she had ever been veiled from clear sight. He’d never known her, and so how could he have loved her?

(The thought is not the consolation he'd hoped it might be.)

She haunts him as any good ghost would, all memory and the whisper of a scent in his sheets and the sense of _something_ just beyond his reaching fingertips - and he does reach, when the night presses close and there is nothing in the ragged-edged spaces she once inhabited but darkness and the suffocating spectre of her. There are nights cannot breathe for the nearness of it, for the completeness of her betrayal: she has taken the ground from beneath his feet and left nothing in its place, and until her death he had failed to see she was all that kept him from falling in its absence.

He weeps for her, or for Thomas, or for himself - he cannot say. His throat constricts as if it were his own neck in the tightening coil of the noose.

* * *

 

He wishes he were strong enough to burn the sheets.

She is only a ghost, and there is safety in that. He carries her on his back but time and wine lessen the weight of her; her presence is a slighter thing now, though she never leaves. The heavier weight - the duty of his birthright - he shed long ago. Now there is only her, arms around his neck, clinging close even though it's he that cannot let her go.

* * *

 

She is _alive_.

The ghost tightens her fingers. His heart skips a beat.

* * *

 

She does what he could not: she burns the sheets, and all the rest too.

* * *

 

She is alive, and she is in Paris.

He sees her again and she is gunsmoke and cruelty and pure avarice, clawing into the cracks of his life and settling there like rot. There is nothing in her left of the blushing girl he'd thought to love: she has passed through death and risen again and now she is everything he ever feared of her.

He doesn't stop to wonder if she always was that way, or if she had slipped from the rope to land neatly in the role his judgement had prepared for her. The distinction matters nothing. She is wicked, she is a _criminal_ , she is fallen and he will have nothing to do with her ungraceful deeds.

* * *

 

Her protector is gone and yet once again she lands on her feet. She grapples her way into the King's favour and thence to his bed so swiftly it is as if she has always been there, safely ensconced in the Louvre and there untouchable. If he weren't so determined to mistrust her he could almost admire her sheer refusal to bow her head beneath the waves and let circumstance take her; how time and again she burns and finds still the ability to rise only higher from the flames.

When he sees her about in the grounds, glowing in her finery like the filigreed hilt of a hidden blade, she looks happier than he has seen her since Pinon. There is a softness to her face he has not observed since he awoke that final morning and opened his eyes to find her own looking back at him - felt the warmth of her smile and her hand resting at the nape of his neck, the morning sun slanting into the room through the open shutters to fill the air with a hazy light the colour of daffodils and catch in her hair when she moved to glint like copper, like _fire_. She rose over him and her hands were warm at his shoulders, her eyes shadowed by the fall of flame-bright hair over one delicate shoulder, but when he snared her fingers with his own she lifted her gaze back to his face and a breath escaped him at the _heat_ there.

In the light she was a woman of gold, proud and lovely as the dawn. He rose onto his elbows and leant in to taste the hollow of her throat, the slope of her shoulder, the shell of her ear…and there she gave a shaky gasp as if she would fall apart there and then in his arms. He grinned into her neck and continued on inward again, his lips marking a trail along her collarbone to come to rest over her heart.

(And she would fall apart, later, when he kissed his way up her thigh and settled there, one hand idly playing over her hipbone while the other sought its place at the only instrument he's ever found himself to be proficient at. There, he would find the closest thing to a perfectness of delight, delight in the sound of her broken teasing from her a stuttering chorus of sighs, lips and tongue and fingersin a labour of love until her body arced taut, hovered fleetingly on the edge as his laughter thrummed through her skin and - caught in the breathless crescendo of her completion - toppled.)

He never did hear a sweeter sound than that.

* * *

 

One day the grim turn returns to her jaw, the look he now knows to fear. He watches her walk away, a dark figure in the marketplace, and wonders that he had ever thought she might change.

* * *

 

He loves her again in peril, when she tears half-clad and entirely indecent through the garrison with a spark in her flint eyes and a snarl on her mouth for him, when her anger cracks against his disapproval and it's more than her customary sneer, it's more than she has ever given him. It's cold and it's hard and it's _true_ in its impatience.

There is no power in his judgement anymore, nor any strength to the wrath that has burned away in him since he sent her to die, and no heart in her lie when she tells him this is not bravery, nor selflessness, nor generosity; this is her watching her own back because that's all she knows how to do anymore. Because no one else will do it for her.

If that were true, he almost says, you would not fear the King's death so much. You would land on your feet, as you seem to always do. This is courage, of a strange and selfish sort, but it is more than mere selfishness would allow. There is more in _her_ than mere selfishness.

He does not say it, though. Saying it would mean he still knew how to read her, or that he ever had done, and _that_ would mean there had been anything true to her when they still thought of themselves as man and wife. It would mean she had been more than a lie, and - perhaps - so had other things.

She throws up walls between them as hesitantly as he reaches to break them down, meeting each overture of careful warmth with a scoff and a shrug and still he can feel the past dissolve, the ghost unwrap its fingers from his neck one by one because she is too much now, too honest and too real for him to let his ghouls linger for the lack of her.

He has been a dead man for as long as she, but watching her stride away from him newly evicted from the king's graces, nothing to her name but her wits and her skill and - and, yes, his respect, as little as it is worth - he has never felt more alive.

And she, destitute, desperate - or so she would have them think - has never been more dangerous.

He follows her. She does not look back at him, walking with her head held high and that proud tilt to her chin that somehow seems more real than any of her coquettish glances or dismissive scowls, but he follows all the same, and when she ignores him and glares Aramis into helping her mount, he hides a smile.

(He smiles for real when he knows she cannot see it.)

He spends the whole ride home watching her, memorising anew the little things he knows he could once have found blindfold, and when Aramis casts him a questioning glance he pretends it was only out of distrust.

It is not a _complete_ lie. He will never trust her, he thinks, not until the truth of his brother's death is exposed.

But when, a small part of him points out, have _his_ intentions ever mattered?


End file.
